The Evil
Poor
Firstly apologies for the blatantly sensationalist and sweeping title of the
post. It’s just that I could think of no better way to put it.
Throughout the years there have always been chroniclers and documenters of the worst of London life. In 1751 William Hogarth shone light into the dark corners with his studies of Gin Lane. He set down the worst behaviour of the indolent poor by drawing them sprawled, thieving, prostituted, numbed even to the suffering of their own children. His was a very urban decay caused by alcohol, peopled by characters devoid of the ability or ambition to climb from the gutter. Nearly 90 years later in 1837 Charles Dickens was writing vividly about the mores of the workhouse society. He knew there were packs of feral children in thrall both to the malign father figure of [ the Jew ] Fagin and the local gangster heavy Bill Sykes. Sykes seems to have become a role model for modern times in that he came complete with devil dog and long suffering battered other half. If you were a London centric person looking at your city today, you might think that there is nothing new under the sun and that nothing has changed.
Gin Lane c. 1750
For London you would be right but this phenomenon of the evil poor has spread so that not a town in England does not have it’s unfair share of Kappa clad, drugged up, workshy, wasters swaggering through the town centre streets with a can of lager in the one hand and a bull mastiff on a string in the other. They aren’t out looking for a job or a chance in life let alone a wash. They are just looking to do you over, nick your stuff, sell you stolen stuff and drugs, take the next drugs and collect the next dole. The attendant girls aren’t much better, shrieking complicit harpies who will all end up looking grey and faded round the edges, kicking dirty nappies out of the way to feed the dog in the kitchen of their two bedroom basic box flat on the grim estate where everything has been broken if it can’t be stolen.
There has been talk and much naiveté about respect and a “respect agenda”. Even in my nick the silly posters have gone up saying “Give Respect – Get Respect.” I think of it as the algebra of the willfully uninformed. There is a simple problem with this stupid, stupid (repeat stupid) slogan. What you and I mean by respect and what Adibok boy means by it are not the same. His respect means “Act like you are scared when I am around. Do what I say because my wants come first every time. If you don’t agree, if you don’t do what I say, then that is disrespect and you won’t like me if I feel disrespected” This is respect as a loaded gun with a hair trigger pointed at your head by a youth high on drugs, booze and ego. Now if you really want me as an officer to give respect to someone that thinks like that, I am happy to do so, but it will be on his or her terms only. There is no respect as I understand it to be given to me or you by the KappaMassiv. They just want to get high, shag your 14 year old daughter until she is pregnant and nick your stuff. Sorry if that’s a bit bleak but it’s a lot true.
This common debasement of our social currency so that the worst of metropolitan life is cloned everywhere is commented on recently by Judges
Judge Russell sentencing in the Sophie Lancaster murder yesterday said said that the case raised “serious questions about the sort of society which exists in this country at the start of a new millennium which was heralded with such optimism.”
Judge Coleridge in his recent Brighton speech said “We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps,”
We, the Police are currently responding with the Dock Greenism of Neighbourhood Policing and Community Focus as if turning back our policing methods 50 years will return society to the state of the 1950′s with us. That isn’t going to happen because we are not a big enough lever to move society and we have never been a catalyst. We can only help by keeping the peace, enforcing the law and protecting life and property.
The evil poor are now with us everywhere. So how are the rest of you planning to deal with them?